A Dream of Ice (16 page)

“I'll be damned if you'll do that, Cai,” Ben said. “Wherever it took you, it's a dangerous tool.”

“No, this is perfect, Ben. You've seen the process, you'll know if you need to stop it. And you're familiar with everything Maanik went through so if Jacob wakes up, if he—” She stopped herself. “If he needs anything, you'll be here to give it to him.”

“And you? What happens to Jacob if you get lost in Galderkhaan or inside your head somewhere?”

“Inside . . . my
head
?” Caitlin's fury flared out of her. “You're still not convinced
any
of this is happening, are you?”

“Something is going on, I just don't know what!”

“Didn't you just say you got a ‘ping' from me, miles away!”

“Maybe it's ESP, or a strong sixth-sense animal instinct, absolutely worth exploring
with controls
 . . . but not something to jump headlong into. And I have to say it: why are
you
convinced this stuff is absolutely, no-question, for real? You're the psychiatrist, the scientist! We had the language, Maanik's fits, the power of suggestion they created—”

“No,” she said. “Ben Moss, don't you dare do this to me.”

“Do what, exactly? Caution you? Think, Cai! You used that chant as a last resort to save a life. Maanik was literally generating fire in her body.”

“Another strong indicator that this is real, wouldn't you say?”

“Pyrokinesis, spontaneous combustion, I don't know,” he said. “
Please
listen. Jacob is down the hall, asleep. For right now, he's perfectly okay. And from what you described, whatever he experienced bore no resemblance to any of the other kids' experiences. Besides, you can't know for sure that going back won't exacerbate the problem.
Tell me one reason you should go jumping into some self-induced hypnotic state that may not have an exit strategy!”

“Because Jacob wasn't here, Ben. For a couple seconds it wasn't him.
That
happened with Maanik too, you saw it. And let's not forget yesterday, at the school, he went away somehow.”

“But what he did was totally different.”

“No.” She pointed at the almond milk still covering the table. “It was violent and angry.”

“Show me.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see what you saw.”

With a cringe, Caitlin sat in Jacob's chair. She mimed the dropping of the glass, then re-created the two fists in the air, the arc of them downward. “That's when he hit the table,” she said. “It seemed to jar him out of the episode.”

“Yeah, well, I don't see anger there, Cai. What I see is frustration, pure and simple.” He read her doubting face, motioned for her to stand. He sat in her place and re-created the sequence. “Which way do you see it, now that it isn't Jacob?”

She half-turned, nodded, then released a huge breath. “Okay, not anger. Not wrath. Something more like . . . disappointment? Resignation about
something
? I . . . I don't know but he was affected by something.”

“Regardless, not worth risking your mind or life for. Not yet.”

She gazed at him mutely and at last shook her head no. “But I have to
do
something, this is Jacob! So what the hell am I going to do, Ben?”

“I don't know yet but you can't go about it like this,” he said.

“I know, but I am so angry,” she told him as she flopped onto the sofa. “And my apartment's already clean, so housework therapy is out.”

“Well, my apartment's not.”

She smacked him in the arm.

“Not bad.”

“What?”

“If my UN stress counselor were here, he'd tell you to throw a couple punches at a pillow.”

She made a face. “Bad Psychiatry 101.”

“Mommy?”

Caitlin's head snapped toward the hallway. Jacob was standing there, smiling, with Arfa prancing toward him. He waved at his mother.

“Hey,” she said, forcing a smile as she signed. “What happened to your nap?”

“It's done,” he said, brushing his hands against each other.

“Did you have any dreams?”

“Yes,” he gestured excitedly. “I was flying.”

“Sounds fun,” Caitlin said, still pretending to be calm.

“
Tawazh!
” he spoke aloud as he ran forward.

Ben and Caitlin exchanged quick looks. Ben was visibly surprised to actually hear the Galderkhaani word, to know that the boy wasn't saying “towers.” She hugged him and he hugged her back in a long “normal” embrace.

“He said it,” Ben whispered. “You didn't imagine it.”

Caitlin nodded over Jacob's shoulder. “Thank you.”

“And it didn't come from me or from you.”

She shook her head.

Ben stayed where he was, studying Caitlin. He noticed that her eyes were wet, and that not all of her tears were from relief.

M
ikel flung himself back against the lava tube, trying to keep distance between himself and the red-orange flame. A lone tendril of fire reached along the stone ceiling and for a moment dipped toward his boots, then it vanished and the echoes of the cracking boom faded to silence.

Hyperventilating, he forced out a big exhale, and it emerged as a horrible, choked shadow of a laugh.

“Christ almighty,” he said aloud, as much to check his hearing after the blast as to vent some of the lingering terror. His ears were fine, though the subsequent quiet was far more discomfiting. His vision had temporarily blanked after the glare but was already returning. He fought a desperate urge to strip off some of his layers of clothing. The suffocating heat was going to dissipate rapidly and then the cold would lunge back at any exposed skin.

He took a deep inhale now and realized two things: that there was no odor associated with the blast, which seemed impossible, and that he was breathing far more air than he should have been after an explosion had just gorged itself on the oxygen in this cramped space.

Quickly taking advantage of the residual warmth, he tugged down his balaclava, pulled off a glove, licked his fingers, and held them to
the air to determine the breeze's point of origin. It was in the same direction as the fireball.

Mikel ignored his brain warning him that another fireball could explode at any moment. It could easily have been a solitary incident, right? Or one that occurred, what, every year or two, at the most? Every decade? Every century? There was no way to tell, judging by the lack of old charring under the fresh scars on the walls.

Maybe old Vol had a point
, he thought.
Nothing is ever learned or discovered by caution. My very presence here is evidence of that.

Mikel pulled on his glove, his hand already starting to feel the chill, and wriggled into a crawling position facing the source of the breeze. One hand nearly landed on the olivine-studded rock and he jerked away from it.

If I'd stayed with the projection, or whatever it was, what would have happened to me? What happened to
them
?

“Projection,” “hologram,” “vision”—they all seemed too mundane for what had just occurred. And the fire he'd experienced had been no vision. The dripping sounds that reached his ears were evidence that the heat had been very real. Eyeing the basaltic rock anchoring the olivine mosaic stone, he assured himself he'd come back to reengage if necessary.

I know where you live, Vol!

Mikel moved cautiously through the tunnel, though his hands bumped and brushed other half-buried objects, Mikel did not experience any unusual sensations.

The mosaic tiles. The artifact I brought to the Group. All one. But one what
? Phosphorous needed oxygen to glow, and that luminosity was definitely coming from
inside
the stone. No oxygen there. It was not porous.

The crawl was ludicrously short, only about fifteen feet. There at the end of it was something that looked like the top of a chimney, with a generally circular shape that extended down at least twenty-five feet, with a hole at the top four feet across. This structure too
was of basaltic rock but it was not continuous with the lava tube. Where the tube had fractured into hexagons while in contact with ice, this projection was as smooth as the walls, shelves, and furniture Mikel had seen in his vision. Inclined at a forty-five-degree angle to the tube, it looked like the lava had hit it, broken it, surrounded it, and then locked it in place as the flow cooled and solidified.

Mikel stopped short. As he shone his lamp ahead into the angled structure he saw stairs.

Not a chimney
, he thought.
I'm at the top of a tower. A hollow column of some kind.

He bared just a wrist to test the air and felt a stronger breeze coming from within the tower. Had wind from this tower extinguished the fireball? Or had the fireball issued from it?

He crept forward a little. Narrow spiral stairs bubbled from the inside of the tower going down. A direction his gut told him not to go.

A tingling sensation filled him, not from without but from within. Fear. Now that he had stopped, now that he was undistracted by physical stimuli, terror had purchase in his atavistic core. It wasn't the geographic isolation; he had been in caves before, in tombs.

No, the fear came from his sharp awareness that he was not alone. There were no hidden lions or snakes here, as in the African veldt or the deserts of Egypt. Nothing that might spring at him. This was worse. It was something enormous and eternal, possibly good, possibly not. And he was stumbling through it like a child. The destruction of his body he could live with—so to speak. But a tormented immortality?

That is hell.

Indeed, for all he knew, that statement might be more than figurative. He trembled as he considered how much an educated, experienced man like himself did
not
know and for that reason, he could not
turn back. To live with his ignorance was a worse fate than destruction or damnation.

But then as soon as he took a step forward, the strange, subterranean wind suddenly seemed to have a voice. It was a new voice, a woman's voice. It seemed to whisper a single word:

Gene . . . gene . . .

“What?” he said through his mask.

The wind was just wind again. And then it wasn't.

Gene . . . ah . . .

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “Lord God.”

The voice was saying “Jina.” The name of the Antarctic researcher who had gone missing. Was she now, somehow, part of this place? Was her mind, her soul,
her knowledge of English
now present in the tiles? Is that how he understood what was being said?

“
Release . . . me . . . please!
”

The utterance was followed by a blast not unlike the one he had heard earlier, only this one was much nearer. It rocked the world around him, on all sides, shaking pebbles from above, and brought with it a fireball that blazed toward him like a hot, red comet until it suddenly came apart. It didn't explode; it simply seemed to come apart, as though it lacked cohesion. There were no embers raining down; the flaming fist simply vanished, taking the ghostly voice with it.

Mikel's first thought was that there was some kind of gas leak down here, and that he was hallucinating. His second thought was that he had to get out, whether it was to get answers or to escape, he just had to move. He adjusted the lamp on his head and, holding the rim of the tower's mouth, lowered himself in.

At a catastrophic tilt, the stairs no longer functioned as such, so Mikel clambered down them using both hands and feet. He moved very, very fast, concerned about being trapped with any additional fireballs. His peripheral vision caught glimpses of olivine tiles on the walls but this wasn't the time to stop and look at them.

Minutes later—maybe a hundred feet down, Mikel propelled himself through the first opening he found. Pressing himself against a wall and briefly shutting his eyes, he was relieved to find solid ground. When he reopened his eyes, he let out a little laugh. He was inside what looked like a man-made tunnel, not a lava tube, and he could feel that the movement of air was stronger now, even through his balaclava.

The tunnel seemed sculpted, because the walls and arched ceiling were smooth except for two long, raised parallel lines that ran along the rock ceiling like tracks—though he couldn't imagine why tracks would exist anywhere but a floor. They appeared to have bubbled from the overhead rock, as though vacuuformed, and there was a spiral twist to them, like a corkscrew. Had they suspended carriages of some kind?

No
, he thought.
Spiral tracks don't make sense
.

Still looking up, he realized that the basalt he'd crouched upon above must have, in its molten state, simply flowed along on top of this tunnel. Was this part of a system that once fueled the Source that they were discussing . . . poured molten lava from one place to another?